“MacBook Air is the industry leader for thin and light notebooks, and now with longer battery life, we’ve set the bar even higher. With faster flash, more powerful graphics and up to 12 hours of battery life, the new MacBook Air packs even more performance into the portable and durable design our customers love,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing.

The new MacBook Air features power-efficient dual-core Intel Core i5 and Core i7 “Haswell” processors (with 1.30GHz – 1.70GHz clock-speed, 3MB/4MB of L3 cache, Intel HD Graphics 5000 with 40 execution units) that give the MacBook Air 13” up to 12 hours of battery life and up to 10 hours of iTunes movie playback. The MacBook Air 11” delivers up to 9 hours of battery life and up to 8 hours of iTunes movie playback, a rather unprecedented battery life for a device that is merely larger than the iPad and runs one of the most powerful CPUs available today. The new systems will be available with 4GB or 8GB of LPDDR3 onboard memory to further cut-down power consumption as well as with brand-new Samsung-developed solid-state storage with 128GB, 256GB or 512GB capacity.

The new MacBook Air not only has longer better life than predecessors, but sports 40% faster performance for gaming and graphics intensive apps; Samsung-designed new flash storage that is based on Samsung S4LN053X01-8030 controller and Samsung-made MLC NAND flash memory, which is up to 45% faster than the previous generation solid-state storage system. Finally, the new MBAs feature Broadcom BCM4360-based 802.11ac Wi-Fi module that supports up to three times faster performance compared to 802.11n (450Mb/s – 600Mb/s).

The new MacBook Air is available today through the Apple Online Store, Apple’s retail stores and resellers. The 11” MacBook Air comes with a 1.3GHz processor, 4GB of memory and is available with 128GB of flash storage starting at $999, and 256GB of flash storage starting at $1199. The 13” MacBook Air comes with a 1.3GHz processor, 4GB of memory and is available with 128GB of flash storage starting at $1099, and 256GB of flash storage starting at $1299. Configure-to-order options include a 1.7GHz Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.3 GHz, up to 8GB of memory and up to 512GB flash storage.